'The Reader'
Love and war crimes
By Phil Villarreal
Pvillarreal@azstarnet.com
Tucson, Arizona | Published: 01.01.2009
Nothing soils the memories of a first love like discovering your ex is a Nazi war criminal. Based on German author Bernhard Schlink's novel, "The Reader" solemnly explores the plight of Michael (played as a teen by David Kross and an adult by Ralph Fiennes), who learns his former lover Hanna (Kate Winslet) was a concentration camp guard.
Michael falls for Hanna when he is a teenager and she is a skittish single woman shortly after World War II.
They meet when she finds him stricken with scarlet fever on the side of a road, then helps him home. Months later, after he recovers, Michael visits her to thank her.
Hanna seduces Michael, leading to the first of a slew of fairly explicit sex scenes.
Michael is enraptured and spurns his friends, studies and family to spend every possible moment with Hanna. She accepts Michael's visits with indifference, ordering him around while watching him closely to see how he responds to subservience.
The Hanna-Michael relationship is abusive and dysfunctional, yet it fills a gaping need in both. Director Stephen Daldry ("Billy Elliot," "The Hours") shifts among three points in time to explore the destructive yet enduring relationship.
There are the hot and steamy early years; the period nearly a decade later when Michael is a law student who is shocked to discover Hanna is on trial for war crimes; and then the 1990s, when Michael is vacant and adrift and looks for meaning by seeking out Hanna, who's now eligible for release.
The trial holds the most drama, as Hanna chooses to lie, and Michael, the only one in the courtroom who's aware of her fabrication, must decide whether to suppress evidence.
Each character's decisions have implications that shape the rest of their lives.
Winslet is stunning in the role, and the makeup job that lines and weathers her face to show the passage of decades is equal to her graceful performance.
Although the love story is at the apex, the movie is really about society's clumsy efforts to deal with the horrors of its past. It argues that evil is not easily identified and leaves no one untouched and few absolved.
The timeline-skipping helps drive those ideas home but disconnects you from the story, which becomes a muddle of loosely connected scenes.
Michael's character never really solidifies, especially since Kross and Fiennes don't look or act much like each other.
"The Reader" is profound but too dyslexic for its own good.
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